Monday 17 October 2011 15.00 EDT
First published on Monday 17 October 2011 15.00 EDT

You don't need many minutes in the company of Danny Dorling to lose reservations about statistics being dry and dull; his face lights up as he transforms the world of denominators and numerators into one of surprise and delight.

Most young women in the UK (18/19-year-olds) now go to university; the biggest concentration of step-children is in the Cotswolds; the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has announced the 60 millionth UK citizen three times in the last 15 years. And that's just the human side. You should hear him describe the excellence of global data about rare toads.

Professor of human geography at Sheffield University, with a bouncy website that asks MSc applicants "Have you ever wondered where your life could have taken you if you had been born somewhere else?", Dorling is the current darling in his field. That status, earned through 30 books by the age of 43, will only increase with the publication today of his magnum opus Fair Play.

Dorling describes it as "an autopsy on New Labour", but it is a post-mortem that includes optimism rather than just confirming depressing causes of death. Especially interesting among the 400 pages, 52 chapters, multiple graphs and generous "further reading" links is proof that increased spending on schools in Labour's last five years raised standards and widened university intake.

"I've included two previously unpublished papers, the first co-written in 2005 with Mark Corver of Hefce [the Higher Education Funding Council for England], which argued that progress was not being made," he says. "We concluded that the government's aim of increasing the number of less-well-off entrants to university could not be realised.

"The second, written last year, proved that we were wrong, which is never a bad thing to have to accept. The findings came as a shock to me, and presumably as a pleasant surprise to Labour ministers."

The data show three almost identical upward curves: one for a 4% rise in university entrants from deprived areas; the second curve plots the improvement in GCSE passes by the same students three years earlier; and the third marks the increase in relevant school spending through such measures as the now largely abolished education maintenance allowance.

Bingo! And Dorling is as pleased with the results as any social reformer would be – or indeed any benevolent person, since the increase was not at the expense of the better-off, whose university entrants also rose, by 2%. But his real satisfaction is in the quality of the data: the denominator comes from stats for child benefit, which is claimed for more than 99% of UK children, and the numerator from postcodes on university applications which, as he says wryly, "applicants tend to make sure they get right".

"It's beautiful," he says, face wreathed in a blissful smile. "Beautiful. For that reason alone I had to put it in." Another example is his use of stats to show the quality of life outside London, a famous phrase which those of us who enjoy it know to be true, but only in that vague, gut way that is anathema to statisticians.

With his colleague Bethan Thomas, he searched for gold-standard data that might apply and came up with benzine air pollution, crime figures, electricity consumption and malicious calls to the fire brigade. This partly playful but exceptionally reliable quartet made the City of London and Kensington and Chelsea the least desirable places to live in the UK, and Rotherham, Redcar and Barnsley the best.

The attitude demonstrates his armour against critics who try to sideline him as partial or politically motivated, or gentler commenters such as the Guardian's own Simon Jenkins, who calls him "the Geographer Royal of the left". Ever since buying the first micro-computer to be seen at Newcastle University and loving its power to harvest facts, he has followed the figures, not started with a theory and then looked for data to support it.

Dorling is of the left, in the broadbrush terms of media discourse that are so different from the precision of academic work, especially in statistics. His parents met at Oxford and were "60s hippies" in his words – admiringly meant, and not just because they are alive and well in retirement in west Wales. His mother taught maths and his father became a GP in east Oxford and Cowley, working to improve things and, Dorling says, "driving his Mini to the car works every year to tell them that the noise levels were too high." It was a patient, Fabian approach.

"Dad carried me on his shoulders on the Aldermaston march and I did try to join the Labour party twice, once when I was too young and the second time when I walked into a branch meeting in Newcastle [his university town] and everyone went silent. I didn't actually say anything – southern accent, with Margaret Thatcher in power and half the town on benefits – but it clearly wasn't going to work. I've come to realise that I'm not a party person. We need them, don't get me wrong, but I can't toe the line."

Thus his summons to spend half an hour with Nick Clegg, conveniently a Sheffield MP, and his emails from Andy Burnham's office don't turn his head with notions of becoming a guru. Neither, refreshingly, do interruptions such as calls from BBC Radio 4's Today programme and al-Jazeera during our chat. He says: "I want to communicate and it's nice to be asked, but academic books really are very hard work, not just in the writing, but checking and checking that your figures are right. Best to stay just under the media horizon and pop up occasionally."

He means it about hard work. He could not read until he was eight or write until he was nine. He is grateful to his father for not telling him until his 20s, when he had fought his way through without special treatment, that he had dyslexia.

He has a longing for everyone to be "connected" with society for the benefit of all. Most eloquently expressed in Donne's "No man is an island", this was hard-wired into him in Oxford, through experiences such as waiting for ages while the Cowley carmakers cycled past before he could cross the road to go to school. His book So You Think You Know About Britain?, published earlier this year, attracted much attention for its dispassionate data on inequality, the geographical nature of poverty and wealth and a general upending of the Daily Mail view of the world.

Dorling is wary of the emotion surrounding private, or independent, education, on which the UK spends more per capita than any other country apart from Chile, but he does criticise it. Not from mean-mindedness – he is certain that the "tall poppy" argument, arguing that greater equality must level down, has no statistical basis. He simply says: "It makes me unhappy to watch people being unnecessarily stupid."

The "stupidity" lies in spending money on resources which the state provides equally well for families with busy, highly motivated home lives whose daily stimulation provides ample private, or independent, education. He recommends any human geographer or statistician in search of a project to study families that can afford private school but choose not to (including his own, his parents' and the present writer's). The results, he predicts, would indicate common sense, not sacrifice.

Otherwise, he would dearly like to see the ONS become fully independent, on the Canadian model, and he predicts that this will happen "following a mighty scandal over duff statistics, especially if the government does away with the census. It can be inaccurate to half or even a whole million, but it has been a wonderful statistical tool since 1801. I am hoping that Britain's army of family historians will rise up and save it."

Dorling's work is globally admired – Fair Play's US co-publishers insisted on the subtitle A Daniel Dorling Reader on Social Justice – and it draws muscle from time he spends as a professor at Canterbury University in New Zealand and in Japan. The latter fascinates him. "It is one of the most equal countries in the world, just as the UK is one of the most unequal. Status comes from age, which most of us are likely to achieve. It is in its 20th year of falling house prices. It is famously entrepreneurial and productive, but industrial relations are quite different." Anyone who has been to the corporate mini-Japan of Nissan in Sunderland, where the sense of common purpose recalls the Quaker chocolate factories of Rowntree and Cadbury, will take the point.

"It also makes a change from the usual academic comparisons with Scandinavia," says Dorling impishly. He is well aware of how to keep ahead of the academic game, as well as needing constant fresh and interesting material for his student lectures, which are predictably popular. Up pops another of his nice statistics, which won't harm him in university circles: "The most disconnected of the UK's elites is the judiciary. The most connected are the vice-chancellors, who have had to work hard and be generally engaged to win appointment."

He has the facts from the Sutton Trust to prove this, with a lifelong belief in keeping his data to hand. A vast map of Reunion, for instance, covers the hall of his house – whose two separate front doors naturally start you wondering, statistically, how many other UK houses share this odd feature. The Indian ocean island was where he honeymooned with Ali, who works for Natural England. "Beautiful, beautiful," he murmurs again, pointing out how the permanently erupting volcano sends lava conveniently, and very connectedly, only into the sea.